Why do precise paintings feel "airless"?

In the art history class with John Paul Thornton last Wed I took the time to feel how art consumers felt who had never seen other pictures of foreign lands. We're so swamped with images nowadays, it's hard to imagine how different we'd respond to paintings like this one by Gerome of Whirling Dervishes, if there were no Arabic people living nearby, no photography, no constant newspaper articles about the Middle East, you knew nobody who'd been there, in fact most people in your neighborhood never traveled anywhere at all, and everyone you knew was either a Christian or a Jew. What crowds would gather around this painting, fascinated by every detail!

Gerome controlled the main Parisian art school and the Salon in which everyone wanted to exhibit. He was confrontational and uncompromising with the emerging Impressionists so there was no sharing, and his popularity petered out before he did. I've read that Impressionists were reacting against the "airless" precision of historical painting, and I think I can feel that in this example but it's hard to say why. Some of the figures are off-balance, seemingly life-like, yet they seem stiffly frozen. Maybe soft edges feel more like motion because we're used to photographic blurring. Or maybe we know that in the time it takes to roam this room and look at each figure, they would all have moved around. Any other ideas?